Deeper Life #221

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.

—1 Peter 4:15

THE SPRINGS OF SUFFERING, FROM a biblical point of view, are twofold: wrongdoing and wrong temper.

Wrongdoing is identified by Peter as he writes, “Let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer.” Wrongdoing finds expression in the literature of all ages. It works a suffering as cruel as that of the grave. Myers accurately describes the suffering of wrongdoing in his poem “Ammergau”:

When this man’s best desire and highest aim

Had ended in the deed of traitorous shame;

When to his blood-shot eyes grew wild and dim,

The stony faces of the Sanhedrin,—

When in his rage he could not longer bear

Men’s voices nor the sunlight nor the air,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nor God in Heaven, nor anything but death.

I bowed my head, and through my fingers ran

Tears for the end of that Iscariot man,

Lost in the hopeless struggle of the soul

To make the done, undone; the broken whole.

Prayer Thought: God forbid that I allow personal wrongdoing to create pain for others.

SUGGESTED READING: 1 Peter 4:15–19